Dark Mirror by Diane Duane
…And this is why when you’re writing and (being in the heat of composition) you use a “placeholder” term or phrase to mark a spot where you intend to come back and coin something more specific, you make sure to (a) make a note of the placeholder, and (b) actually do the coining in the “cleanup” pass on the submission draft. Otherwise something like “X and Y” may actually make it all the way to press.
(sigh)
And yet X and Y is a believable title for a modern avant garde Klingon opera
due to that other post i was also thinking about what social media would be like in the pokemon universe
i think people would be a little stupid
rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3
we are in the midst of a true Real One
join a union
the power of collection action
Evangelicals imagine their opponents as evangelicals-in-reverse. Instead of surrendering to God and spreading his message, they have surrendered to the power of sin and seek to spread its message. The field of struggle is the mass of confused and misinformed souls who have not yet been offered the chance to accept Christ. In neither case is there any possibility of legitimate disagreement—anyone who is not a member of the evangelical community is either a fool or a demon.
On the political level, this means that there is no reason to respect the democratic will of the people. Thus it is no coincidence that our last two Presidents to enjoy overwhelming evangelical support were also initially installed despite losing the popular vote. Nor is the evangelical focus on the Supreme Court merely a strategic political decision. Evangelicals’ reliance on the antidemocratic aspects of the American constitutional system fits perfectly with their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the choices and values of anyone outside the evangelical community. After all, those choices and values represent only ignorance and sin. To the extent that they can impose their religious standards on others, evangelicals are saving these people from themselves—and depriving them of their ability to corrupt evangelical children.
Adam Kotsko, The Evangelical Mind
Mitsubishi Lynx Concept, 1993. A open-topped 2-seat 4x4 kei-car with a 660cc engine that was presented at the 30th Tokyo Motor Show. The idea was to replicate the open feeling of riding a motorbike hence no roof and screens for driver and passenger rather than a conventional windshield
Helium
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downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
followed by
is such a funny sequence
i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE
I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd
No, y'all don't even understand.
There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.
That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop
Yall don't know how much I adore all of this
Prison "avoidance" is taking hold in adults
Seriously it is sickening that they would rather spin this as a Mental Disorder than acknowledge the myriad reasons kids might not want to go to school
as a teacher, it makes me sick that we as a society would rather blame children for not wanting to come to school, rather than helping them and changing the school system into a safe and comforting and caring place to help them learn and grow and that they'd actually want to come to.
Harry Potter is like a fine whisky, it gets better with age.
Sherlock is like heroin, everyone is itching for their next fix.
Doctor Who is like red wine, mature and has a big history.
consulting-spaceman
the-dalek-in-221b
date of origin: 23rd of november, 2012.
This post aged like harry potter did: Like fucking milk left out uncapped in the sun
i think the reason so many people online are like "yeah i respect sex workers but i think anyone who's pays for sex is a cum brained freak" is that so many people seem to unintentionally view desiring sexual intimacy as like incel behavior. like i promise you the problem with incels isn't that they want to have sex with beautiful women the problem is they view women as non-human hope this helps.
what the libcucks fail to understand is that this is a small price to pay for the end goal: an embedded HUD with unskippable advertisements in the margins of your eyesight
this screenshot is a headline edit/joke, about a real USA Today article (which is far more praising) and is spreading around twitter and here. The real number of primates they've killed is lower, but I think it's important to understand why.
Neurallink is a fucking awful company whose marketing materials and CEO are outright lying as to their products' supportable potential. But they're not big enough to actually have killed 3,000 primates. Most significantly, we know that the the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against a UC Davis lab for invasive and deadly brain experiments on 23 intelligent primates.
The Physician Committee points out in its complaint that Neuralink and UC Davis staff failed to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue” that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide for the psychological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.
The reason it's important to point out that it's less than 3,000 is that this kind of work is very often done at university laboratories, which gives us more leverage to slow it down or keep it out of this dude's hands.
Holy...okay. 3000 non-human primates might not be the correct number, but even 23 primates dead in this experiment is horrifying from a science perspective.
I worked in a neuroscience lab that did work with one (1) rhesus monkey. His name was Beckett. Beckett had better healthcare than a university undergraduate. Hell, it took less hoops to get some experimental studies involving undergrad volunteers up and running than it was to do one experiment with Beckett wherein he got to sit in a chair and eat grapes.
See, the paperwork regarding experiments with animals was intense. I spent three days filling out the forms and going back and forth with the ethics board to let us do experiments on terminal mice wherein they'd peacefully be put under anesthesia and never wake up from surgery. As in we were putting a sick mouse to sleep and had to be 100% sure it would not be in any pain or distress. Screwing up and causing a mouse harm or killing it outside of these exact bounds? You'd be lucky if you ever got to work with a mouse again.
Not only that, but since an animal was expected to die in the experiment, we had to report how many we needed in the experiment and then how many actually died. And if the latter number was higher, you better believe the ethics board would be on our case demanding to know what the actual hell happened.
(There's a plaque, by the way, in the labs, in remembrance of all the animals whose lives we ask for in the pursuit of science. It's right there when you walk in.)
The paperwork and restrictions get more and more complex and strict the higher up the "evolutionary chain" you go up. If you MUST use an animal model, you use the lowest one on the chain that can meet your requirements. As in, why use frogs if you can use zebrafish? Why use fish if you can use fruitflies? Why use a living creature at all if your computer simulation is good enough? And if you can't give a good answer, your proposal should be denied.
Back to the monkeys and Beckett. Monkeys, or "non-human primates" as they're often known as, are usually at the top of this chain. Ideally, you treat them like humans who are unable to consent for themselves. Which means they need advocates for them. Beckett pretty much had a vet assigned just to him. If he so much as had a sniffle, the vet had the power to veto any and all experiments he'd be involved in until he was feeling better.
This was important because if your lab had a monkey and that monkey died for reasons other than "natural causes" that the ethics board did not okay? There was going to be an investigation and if they didn't like what they found, not only would your lab never get another monkey again, but there was a damn good chance you'd be barred from working with any and ALL animals.
So from this perspective, "23 monkeys dead" should be read a very specific kind of shock and disgust. One dead should have made any kind of ethics board hit the breaks on this shit and start asking pointed questions as to "why".
(Oh, and in case you're wondering, there is an answer to the question of "what happens to monkeys who can't be used in research anymore?"
They're sent to the farm.
No, really. There are legit primate sanctuaries specifically for retired research primates. Where they get to live out the rest of their days in peace and safety in as close to a natural environment as possible. Beckett was a cranky old guy, and when I left the lab he was still there, but the plan had been for him to retire to one of those. I hope he got there and ate as many grapes as he could sucker the researchers into giving him as he could.)
Fellow researcher here, and I can 100% concur with the above. It takes SO much work and paperwork to get approved for every animal you get your hands on. We have hundreds of documents that will state essentially the same 5 things over and over because we HAVE to have a paper trail.
Having almost two dozen non-human primates dead? That's horrifying. Someone was bribed and the ethics board should be at all of their throats, shutting down this project forever.
I think about this cake every day
sorry for exposing your tags but this is hilarious
OP, I hope you don’t mind me making an addition:
When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.
The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?
This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.
I love a botched cake.
